Costa Rican tree roots out plantation pests

Seeds and leaves from a Costa Rican tree have yielded a chemical that is lethal to the nematode worms that often devastate banana and coffee plantations in the tropics. The chemical, isolated by chemists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, looks likely to become the first commercial product to emerge from a British-led research programme aimed at isolating 'biopesticides' from tropical plants.

Plantation owners, who suffer huge losses to nematodes and the diseases they spread, want a safer alternative to the highly toxic synthetic chemicals currently use to control the worms. The chemical extracted from the seeds and leaves of the leguminous tree Lonchocarpus costaricaensis is a pyrrolidine alkaloid called DMDP, which has a structure that mimics a sugar.

DMDP is extremely promising as a biopesticide: it works at concentrations as low as 1 part per million, and it is a 'systemic' - sprayed on the leaves it works its ...

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